The Wall (2 page)

The whole place has been flattened. Squashed. Pushed over. One wall is still intact, at a forty-five-degree angle, and the rest has just shattered and crumbled underneath it, into not much more than a heap of rubble. Sticking out from the mound of stones and mortar, I can see half a faded pink dressing table; blocks of splayed and crinkled paper, still bound together, but no longer really books; a telephone with no receiver, trailing a wire that snakes away as if it is still expecting a call; a toy pram; a yellow dress hanging halfway out of a collapsed window frame; a DVD player bent in half; a toilet seat with an embroidered cover.

Two voices spark up in my head. One of them is excited, telling me this is the best adventure playground, the best climbing frame, the best secret hideout I’ve ever seen. It wants me to jump straight down and explore the ruin. The other one holds me back. This voice is quieter – it doesn’t even seem to have any words – but it’s more powerful and keeps me motionless on top of the fence. It’s a feeling I can’t quite understand, something to do with the stuff spilling out of the demolished house, something to do with the obvious suddenness with which this place was transformed from a home into a heap of junk. An eerie chill seems to be rising up from the rubble. It’s as if an aftertaste of violence is hanging in the air, like a bad smell.

All the houses in Amarias are the same. You see new ones going up all the time: first the concrete, sprouting metal bars like a dodgy haircut, then the red roof and the windows, and finally the cladding of stone slapped on like a paint job. This one’s different. There’s no concrete. Just proper lumps of solid stone.

I want to jump in and romp around and climb to the top, and at the same time I have an urge to run away and forget what I’ve seen. I sense that just for looking over this fence, just for knowing what the so-called building site contains, I’m in trouble.

Holding tight to the top of the fence, I look more closely over the site. Though the garden has mostly gone wild, or disappeared under rubble, from up high I can make out a pattern of paths and beds. A huge rose bush has covered a toppled wall in crimson blooms. In the corner are six old-looking fruit trees, planted in a perfect circle, forming what would once have been a shady grove. The trees are dead, with a scattering of dried-up leaves still clinging to the branches, but they surround a metal swing seat which looks as if it might work, as if it might be the only thing untouched by the carnage all around. Beyond the fruit trees, the ground is bare, flat, grooved with neat rows of bulldozer tracks, right up to The Wall.

My mouth is suddenly dry and sticky. I feel as if I’ve accidentally glimpsed one of my friends’ mothers, naked. It seems almost shameful to be sitting here, staring at this smashed-up home that is the absolute opposite of everything my town is supposed to be. But I can’t look away.

I know it’s wrong to climb over these ruins, in the same way it would be wrong to play football in a graveyard, but I can’t just turn and leave. I need to know more. I need to touch and feel this place, walk around in it, look for clues as to what happened. And I still want my ball.

I glance down, between my knees. The inside of the hoarding is slatted, much easier to climb than the smooth exterior. I can go in and out as quickly as I want. No one needs to know what I’ve done, except maybe David. He probably won’t believe me, but I decide my mission can be to find a souvenir that will prove I really jumped in and explored. It won’t be difficult to pick out something good. Even from up here, I can see that the possessions spilling out of the house never belonged to people like us. This was the home of people from the other side. The mystery isn’t what happened to them, it’s how they found themselves on the wrong side of The Wall in the first place, and why the site hasn’t been cleared and built on.

I climb down the slats, and turn to face the demolished house. Inside the site, behind the hoardings, there’s an eerie silence. I could scamper up the toppled wall in a few seconds if I wanted to, but the graveyard feeling is even stronger in here, shielded from the outside world.

I shuffle along the fence, heading towards the back of the building, pulled by a strange urge to sit on the swing seat, see if it still works, hear what noise it makes. A pair of old-fashioned patio doors comes into view, a white-painted wooden frame and lots of small square panes of glass, one in each corner tinted blue. The nearer door is crushed and shattered; the other is untouched, still upright, half filling a doorway from nothing to nothing.

I find a garden path made of red tiles, which leads me in a smooth arc to the swing seat. It’s furry with rust, like a sunken ship. I give it a gentle push, expecting it to squeak, but instead I hear a bang from the far side of the garden which makes me jump backwards.

A flash of movement around the side of the house catches my eye, and I see a small cloud of dust rising from the earth. As the dust clears, a square sheet of metal becomes visible.

I crouch motionless behind the swing seat, ready to run and hide if anyone appears.

Nothing moves. Minutes pass, and everything remains still and silent. If anyone was here when I arrived, they’ve now gone. I see my ball, nestled in a dusty channel between two clumps of stone, sitting on a mouldering scrap of red cloth that looks like the remains of a cushion cover.

I wait a little longer, until I’m sure that I’m alone, then I fetch my ball and slowly approach the metal sheet. It has a greasy, ridged surface, which I kneel and touch. My hand jumps back at me. The metal is hot, glinting in the bright sunlight.

There are footprints in the dust around me, leading towards and away from where I’m squatting. Along the path of these footprints, I see something odd: something not dusty or old or broken. It’s small, but new, and still working. A dim gleam, barely visible in the daylight, is coming from one end. It’s a torch. A working torch, still on.

I pick it up. I switch it off and switch it on. It can’t have been there long; the batteries are still fresh. I turn and look again at the metal sheet. The bang; the footprints; the torch – these three things connect. There’s something under that metal.

I scour the wasteland around me, checking I’m still alone. I wonder for a moment if I should get help. Tell an adult, maybe. But what would I say, and why on earth would they believe me or be interested? I found a torch that works. Something moved and went bang. In fact, what were the chances of me even getting to the interesting part of the story before being told off and punished for climbing into the building site? Besides, even if they did believe me, and I had uncovered something important, would I be allowed to see it? Would I ever be told the truth about what was discovered? Probably not.

If I want to find out what’s under there, I have to do it myself, and I have to do it straight away.

I bend my knees and heave at the metal, revealing a glimpse of a dark hole. I push again, the hot, sharp edge digging into my skin, but with a firm shove, it slides aside. I drop the sheet, and immediately realise this hole is no ordinary hole. There’s a rope tied to a metal pin that has been hammered into the soil just under the surface. The rope is knotted at regular intervals, each gap the length of my forearm. I can make out four knots, then nothing: just a black void. The hole is the size of a manhole, but an irregularity to the shape gives the feeling it has been dug without machines. This is the entrance to something.

I kneel at the edge and shine the torch downwards, with my arm stretched out as far as it will go. In the weak, thin beam, I trace the rope to where it ends in a tangled white blob, sitting on a dark surface that looks like soil. But it’s hard to be sure.

I can’t look at a high thing without wanting to go up it. Now I’m staring down this hole – a hole like nothing I’ve ever seen before – and the same voice is piping up, telling me I have to go down, I have to take a look, I have to know what it’s for and where it goes.

I have a hunch as to what this might be, and I know how dangerous it is to get involved with anything like it, but on the other hand, stumbling across this mystery, in the middle of my boring, boring town with nothing to do and nowhere to go, is like finding buried treasure. I can’t just leave it there and walk away.

Maybe I ought to work out the risks, remind myself of everything I’ve been warned about, take stock of what I have to lose. I know that’s what David would do if he was here with me, but that’s not the kind of person I am, and it’s not who I want to be, either. Mysteries are for solving, walls are for climbing, secret hideouts are for exploring. That’s just how things are.

I pocket the torch and slide myself into the hole. The first knot is just beyond the reach of my feet, so I squeeze the rope with my knees and edge myself downwards, hand over hand, until I have a knot to stand on. After that it’s easy to shunt myself lower, knot by knot, to the bottom. I’m just beginning to enjoy the climb when I hit the soil, and find myself wishing the hole was deeper.

The earth at the bottom is softer and darker than on the surface, cool against the palm of my hand. There’s a musty smell, like a bag of football kit you’ve forgotten about for a few days. I switch on the torch and immediately see that my suspicion was correct. The hole is more than a hole. It’s a tunnel, held up with props of rough wood and thin planks that look like they’ve come from packing crates. Mostly, though, it’s just a thin but seemingly endless tube of soil, disappearing ahead into darkness, in the direction of The Wall.

Now I have a choice. I can go back up, collect my football, and head home; or I can go through. I know what I ought to do. I know what every other boy in Amarias would do. But as I see it, those are the two best reasons there could possibly be for doing the opposite.

I've lived in Amarias
since I was nine, and in those four years I've never once been to the other side. The Wall is taller than the tallest house in town. If I wanted to see over it, I'd have to stand on the shoulders of a man who was standing on another man who was standing on another man who was standing on another man. Depending on how tall they were, you might need one more. This opportunity has not yet arisen.

The Wall was put up to stop the people who live on the other side setting off bombs, and everyone says it has done an excellent job. Most of the people who work on the building sites in Amarias are from the other side, and if you drive to the city you see lots of people who look like they come from those towns, but other than that, even though they're living right next door, it feels like they aren't really there. Actually, that's not right. You know they're there, because The Wall and the checkpoints and the soldiers who are all over the place are a constant reminder, but it's as if they are almost invisible.

I thought I'd never see into a town beyond The Wall until my military service, but now, looking down this column of musty air, I realise that within five minutes I could be poking my head up, seeing what's there. The alternative is to wait five more years, until my conscription.

People say hysterical things about what's on the other side, but adults can't help exaggerating. They're always trying to make you believe that one cigarette will kill you, that crossing the road is as lethal as juggling with knives, that cycling without a helmet is bordering on suicide, and none of it ever turns out to be true. How dangerous could it really be just to pop through and take a quick look? And how frustrated will I feel tomorrow if I just climb back out now and go home?

It sounds crazy, but I'm not even scared when I decide to go for it. Frankly, it's the only logical course of action. If you have the chance to uncover a secret and you walk away without looking, there's something wrong with you.

The torch lights a few metres of tunnel ahead of me, but no more. I look upwards one last time and see, as if through a telescope, a disc of blue sky with one tiny puff of cloud drifting across it.

I crouch on to my hands and knees, waving the torch in front of me, trying to get used to the way it produces only a narrow beam of visibility enclosed on all sides by dense, velvety blackness. At first, it seems almost like a magic trick, the way objects disappear the instant you move the torch away from them. Then I think how odd it is, when you live in a town, that you can get through your whole life without ever seeing real darkness. Amarias is constantly illuminated, with orange streetlights that stay on all night, and floodlights at the checkpoint.

One last worry pops into my head. I take the phone from my pocket and squeeze it to light up the screen. Down in my hole, there's only one bar of signal. I put the torch down and write a quick text to my mum: ‘Playing football with David. Back later.'

Clutching the torch in my right fist, with my other hand flat on the damp earth, I begin to edge forwards. The sound in the tunnel is both oddly loud and unsettlingly quiet. I can't hear any outside noises at all, but every movement I make seems to bounce back at me off the walls, as if amplified. The scrape of my hand and the torch against the soil; the drag of my shoes behind me; the panting of my own breath; all these seem to boom around me like a static echo which only quietens when I stop moving. Even then, I feel as if I can hear myself swallow and blink.

Fear seems to seep out of the soil, into my body, like coffee soaking through a sugar lump. As tension closes round my heart and squeezes my lungs, I try to imagine that the real me is somewhere else, up above in the daylight, safe and calm. I pretend there are two versions of me, one in the tunnel, another one encouraging me on from above. The more I think of this, the easier it becomes to picture, like a cross-section through the earth: me on my knees going through a horizontal tunnel, then above that a layer of soil, then above that another me, matching my movements, walking through the gardens of the demolished house, getting closer and closer to The Wall, and at any moment simply ghosting through it to the unknown place on the other side.